In the wake of the Terror, France's political and intellectual elites set out to refound the Republic and, in so doing, reimagined the nature of the political order. They argued vigorously over imperial expansion, constitutional power, personal liberty, and public morality. In Reimagining Politics after the Terror, Andrew Jainchill rewrites the history of the origins of French Liberalism by telling the story of France's underappreciated "republican moment" during the tumultuous years between 1794 and Napoleon's declaration of a new French Empire in 1804. Examining a wide range of political and theoretical debates, Jainchill offers a compelling reinterpretation of the political culture of post-Terror France and of the establishment of Napoleon's Consulate. He also provides new readings of works by the key architects of early French Liberalism, including Germaine de Staël, Benjamin Constant, and, in the epilogue, Alexis de Tocqueville. The political culture of the post-Terror period was decisively shaped by the classical republican tradition of the early modern Atlantic world and, as Jainchill persuasively argues, constituted France's "Machiavellian Moment." Out of this moment, a distinctly French version of liberalism began to take shape. Reimagining Politics after the Terror is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history of political thought, the origins and nature of French Liberalism, and the end of the French Revolution.

Republicanism is a centuries-old political tradition, yet its precise meaning has long been contested. The term has been used to refer to government in the public interest, to regimes administered by a collective body or an elected president, and even just to systems embodying the values of liberty and civic virtue. But what do we really mean when we talk about republicanism? In this new book, leading scholar Rachel Hammersley expertly and accessibly introduces this complex but important topic. Beginning in the ancient world, she traces the history of republican government in theory and practice across the centuries in Europe and North America, concluding with an analysis of republicanism in our contemporary politics. She argues that republicanism is a dynamic political language, with each new generation of thinkers building on the ideas of their predecessors and adapting them in response to their own circumstances, concerns, and crises. This compelling account of the origins, history, and potential future of one of the world’s most enduring political ideas will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in republicanism, from historians and political theorists to politicians and ordinary citizens.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2021 Revolutionary Europe is an original examination of radical political movements during Europe's long 19th century. It employs both national and transnational contexts, incorporating new debates in Atlantic history, empire studies and cultural history to give a comprehensive narrative of the period from 1775 to 1922. Rather than assessing revolution as a purely theoretical, socially-driven force or a structural phenomenon, the book presents revolution as a process of community building and cultural identification born from instances of acute social and political crisis. Taking into account various moments of political upheaval during the 19th century, including the French, Russian and 1848 revolutions, it explores the ways in which political actors attempted to construct new definitions of sovereignty and social unity in a period characterized by vast social, economic and governmental change. In a wide-ranging text that covers Britain and much of continental Europe in detail, as well as reaching out to the Americas and Atlantic and Mediterranean Worlds, Gavin Murray-Miller provides an authoritative transnational study of revolution in the 19th-century age of high nationalism.

Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions charts a transformation in the way people thought about democracy in the North Atlantic region in the years between the American Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. In the mid-eighteenth century, 'democracy' was a word known only to the literate. It was associated primarily with the ancient world and had negative connotations: democracies were conceived to be unstable, warlike, and prone to mutate into despotisms. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the word had passed into general use, although it was still not necessarily an approving term. In fact, there was much debate about whether democracy could achieve robust institutional form in advanced societies. In this volume, a cast of internationally-renowned contributors shows how common trends developed throughout the United States, France, Britain, and Ireland, particularly focussing on the era of the American, French, and subsequent European revolutions. Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions argues that 'modern democracy' was not invented in one place and then diffused elsewhere, but instead was the subject of parallel re-imaginings, as ancient ideas and examples were selectively invoked and reworked for modern use. The contributions significantly enhance our understanding of the diversity and complexity of our democratic inheritance.

The Afterlives of the Terror explores how those who experienced the mass violence of the French Revolution struggled to come to terms with it. Focusing on the Reign of Terror, Ronen Steinberg challenges the presumption that its aftermath was characterized by silence and enforced collective amnesia. Instead, he shows that there were painful, complex, and sometimes surprisingly honest debates about how to deal with its legacies. As The Afterlives of the Terror shows, revolutionary leaders, victims' families, and ordinary citizens argued about accountability, retribution, redress, and commemoration. Drawing on the concept of transitional justice and the scholarship on the major traumas of the twentieth century, Steinberg explores how the French tried, but ultimately failed, to leave this difficult past behind. He argues that it was the same democratizing, radicalizing dynamic that led to the violence of the Terror, which also gave rise to an unprecedented interrogation of how society is affected by events of enormous brutality. In this sense, the modern question of what to do with difficult pasts is one of the unanticipated consequences of the eighteenth century's age of democratic revolutions. Thanks to generous funding from Michigan State University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes, available on the Cornell University Press website and other Open Access repositories.

The French Revolution in Global Perspective illuminates the dense connections among the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the French Revolution, revealing how new political forms—at once democratic and imperial, anticolonial and centralizing—were generated in and through continual transnational exchanges and dialogues. Situating the French Revolution in the context of early modern globalization for the first time, this book offers a new approach to understanding its international origins and worldwide effects. A distinguished group of contributors shows that the political culture of the Revolution emerged out of a long history of global commerce, imperial competition, and the movement of people and ideas in places as far flung as India, Egypt, Guiana, and the Caribbean. This international approach helps to explain how the Revolution fused immense idealism with territorial ambition and combined the drive for human rights with various forms of exclusion. The essays examine topics including the role of smuggling and free trade in the origins of the French Revolution, the entwined nature of feminism and abolitionism, and the influence of the French revolutionary wars on the shape of American empire.

How debates over secrecy and transparency in politics during the eighteenth century shaped modern democracy "Thought-provoking. . . . As Carter's history shows with wonderful nuance, democratic governance is about a process of ongoing negotiation, not merely being in the know."--Bronwen Everill, Foreign Policy Does democracy die in darkness, as the saying suggests? This book reveals that modern democracy was born in secrecy, despite the widespread conviction that transparency was its very essence. In the years preceding the American and French revolutions, state secrecy came to be seen as despotic--an instrument of monarchy. But as revolutionaries sought to fashion representative government, they faced a dilemma. In a context where gaining public trust seemed to demand transparency, was secrecy ever legitimate? Whether in Philadelphia or Paris, establishing popular sovereignty required navigating between an ideological imperative to eradicate secrets from the state and a practical need to limit transparency in government. The fight over this--dividing revolutionaries and vexing founders--would determine the nature of the world's first representative democracies. Unveiling modern democracy's surprisingly shadowy origins, Carter reshapes our understanding of how government by and for the people emerged during the Age of Revolutions.